reactions

I was thinking about Humphry Davy's way of describing chemistry and science in Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812):

The foundations of chemical philosophy, are observation, experiment, and analogy. By observation, facts are distinctly and minutely impressed on the mind. By analogy, similar facts are connected. By experiment, new facts are discovered; and, in the progression of knowledge, observation, guided by analogy, leads to experiment, and analogy confirmed by experiment, becomes scientific truth.

and I was thinking about how that's how our minds work and how we develop a sense of ourselves. We tell ourselves stories over and over until they become our truth. 

Maybe I can revise my story. No one knows my story - my story about myself, I mean. 

I'd like to write something in a castle at night with candles, and books, and maybe the ocean outside. 

I have this heavy sense that the story that defines me is already written, as if I couldn't write something new. 

Jan Golinski wrote a book about Humphry Davy called, The Experimental Self , in which he writes about how Davy was a scientist (although he was other things too, like a poet) before such a thing existed, so he had to forge his own identity in a lifelong process of 'experiments in selfhood'. Golinski - who is a professor of history and humanities - has also written some very good books about the constructivist approach to science, which sees its development as a human/ social/ cultural process rather than just a process of apprehending objective truths. This builds on the work of Thomas Kuhn, especially in his important book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he suggests that subjectivity and group dynamics play an important part in scientific progress. 

Is it possible to represent truth when any form of representation is also an act of creation? I can write about myself and my thoughts but what I write is a text about those things, not some kind of conveyance of the things themselves. What I express is more of a reaction to what's in my mind than an expression of it.